CASE STUDY: Service Corporation International

Service Corporation International
Takes Ivanti to the Cloud

Profile:SCI is North America’s leading provider of funeral andcemetery services.

Website:www.sci-corp.com

Solution:®

Ivanti Service Manager, cloud deployment

Benefits to SCI:
§ Improved efficiency with consolidated ticketing andtracking for IT services and business processes§ Leveraged a single solution with concurrent licenses toreduce costs

Service Corporation International (SCI) cares formore than 300,000 families each year. Its
network encompasses over 2,000 funeralservice locations and more than 450 cemeteries
located across 45 states and the District ofColumbia in the U.S., eight Canadian provinces,and Puerto Rico. In 2016, SCI was recognized
for its dedication to service excellence,receiving the J.D. Power President’s Award.

§ Improved business insight with enhanced analytics ofcentralized data
§ Increased user satisfaction by letting users and vendorsinteract easily with SCI services

Growing Use by Leaps and Bounds
SCI entered the 21st century with a mission to refine its
network of funeral, memorial, and interment services
providers and expand its geographic footprint inNorth America.
As the company reduced its use of offshore IT operations, it
took its onshore business to the next level, acquiring
competitors that include the Alderwoods Group, Keystone
North America, and Stewart Enterprises, and also acquireda majority stake in The Neptune Society.
As SCI further solidified its reputation as the continent’s
finest death-care provider, the need for a centralized
enterprise ticketing, tracking, and reporting system for bothbusiness and IT service processes became increasinglyclear. That was the path to gaining better control and insightwww.ivanti.com

CASE STUDY: Service Corporation International

into all its expansive operations. Ultimately, it also became
apparent that SCI needed to move its service management
capabilities to the cloud to better support mobile and remoteusers, including vendors and outsourcing partners.
It’s been an amazing journey for SCI from when it started
using Ivanti Help Desk “Classic” software in 2000 as an
on-premise deployment for handling IT help desk andsupport center tickets. Today, it relies on Ivanti Service
Manager deployed in the cloud to function as its incident
management and reporting system for finance andaccounting, human resources, sales, and procurement
service management processes and workflows, as well
as for IT.
For another perspective on how critical the service
management solution is to SCI, consider this: Last year thecompany handled 328,000 tickets, up from just a couple ofthousand tickets when Ivanti was first deployed. “In 2000,
we started with 3,000 computers. We now have about
18,000 computers in our network,” explains Thomas Smith,director of Information Technology Support at SCI.
The number of IT tickets has increased as a result, but sotoo has the company’s need to implement a consolidated
means of ticketing and tracking for the many other businessprocesses that depend on its technology infrastructure.
At SCI, Ivanti supports requests for everything from namechanges in HR systems to banking institution switches inpayroll procedures, all via email, phone, walk-in, or selfservice ticket requests. It also makes it possible to track andanalyze the company’s gamut of data – from employees’
accrued-leave balances to the type of computing equipment
that’s been bought – in its Ivanti database.

Ivanti’s BI reporting tool is the force behind pulling service
management information to help the company understandits IT position and performance. For example, a VP canpull all tickets related to anyone of the company’s 2,000
locations for an overall status update – that’s not somethingthat could be done easily when multiple spreadsheetsfor various business divisions’ items resided on individuals’
personal computers.
BI reporting also comes into play so that users across all its
locations can gain insight into their own particular issues inan ad hoc fashion. “We couldn’t do it in the past because itwas very structured reporting,” Smith says. “Insight into
what’s going on with the business and specific divisions is
our biggest benefit from Ivanti Service Manager.”
For Smith personally, Ivanti opens a doorway into better
understanding IT workloads that may be handled by internal
staff or outsourcing providers – how many tickets arelogged, first-call resolution and escalation metrics, andwhether staffing is in balance to meet demand. “Having one
centralized spot to research is a big factor in how you
integrate a team, be it an outsourced vendor or in-house,”
he says.

Cloud Migration Merits
When SCI originally brought Ivanti onboard, users had toVPN into the system and be on-premise to use it. But as
more of SCI’s applications such as payroll, time entry, andintranet moved to the cloud, SCI saw the need to migrate its
Ivanti help desk there, too. It did so in 2013, becoming oneof the first Ivanti customers to do so.

Thomas Smith, SCI Director, Information Technology Support

The move made smart business sense. The cloud provided
a more seamless connection between the company’swidespread funeral operators and other providers and key
business workflows than they’d experienced in the past.
Also, “being in the cloud enabled people to go from any
device anywhere to open a ticket,” Smith says. “If someone
is away from the office and their payroll is not right, they can
open a ticket from anywhere.”

When we started working with other departments, theywanted centralized tracking of their incidents and requests,”
Smith says. Four hundred Ivanti analysts use the solution
today – more than 10 times as many as were involved withSCI’s help desk system at launch.

The cloud environment also provided a more modern lookand feel for a new generation coming into the business.
Younger people are looking for an Amazon-, PayPal- oreBay-like interface, Smith says. Ivanti in the cloud “doesn’tlook like your grandfather’s IT, which appeals to the younger
workers and users,” he says.

“Insight into what’s going on with thebusiness and specific divisions is ourbiggest benefit from Ivanti Service Manager.”www.ivanti.com

CASE STUDY: Service Corporation International

For the IT department, another important point is that its
telecom and networking services vendors and outsourcers
are able to access Ivanti through the cloud to update tickets
for the tasks they accomplish. “Telecom, networking, andcomputer installs get tasked from our system to their Ivantiinstance and run there,” Smith says.
In fact, Smith can leverage the cloud environment to add aninternal or external IT team to a project in a matter of hours,
when in the past it took a lot of programming to geteverything set up where needed. “We’re able to put
something in play and run it in a test environment, which we
couldn’t do as easily in the on-premise version, where it’smore painful to add and test,” he adds.

Cloud Eases Path to Onshore IT Ops
Currently Smith has teams handling IT work in Houston,
New Orleans, and Orlando, as well as in India. But the cloudhas been a force in helping SCI reduce offshore IT
operations, something that Smith was keen on because ofissues concerning high staff attrition and lower service
performance with offshore workers. While onshore
personnel command a slightly higher per-hour rate, in theend they are more efficient so the cost is ultimately less,
Smith contends.
SCI has moved its entire IT service desk operation from
India to Orlando —and it did it quickly and with nointerruption of service. “Moving our service desk from
offshore to onshore was seamless because it was in thecloud,” Smith says. “There was no loss of any data. It was
our biggest success with Ivanti Service Manager in the last
three years.”
Another success it experienced was moving the on-premise
Ivanti help desk instance of Stewart Enterprises to theIvanti cloud easily without disruption after SCI had
acquired that company.

And while Ivanti isn’t the direct reason that SCI recently won
the J.D. Power President’s Award in recognition of its
dedication to service excellence, Smith says that “it helped
us to be more customer-oriented.”
Smith is continually on the lookout to increase the use ofIvanti in other areas. It could be a further customer service
asset, for instance, with its ticketing system being leveraged
to help alert funeral operators after-hours about a client’s
need for their services. “Eventually I’d like to have all that inIvanti,” he notes. “When someone passes away, the first callis to the funeral director.”
Smith is also excited about the opportunity to further
leverage Ivanti in conjunction with an increasingly mobileworkforce, as well as to exploit its chat, remote-control,and knowledge-management integration features that canease analysts’ jobs and further improve customer
satisfaction. Integrating different cloud-based software
solutions into one streamlined Ivanti solution is also on
his agenda, as is using it to help SCI dive deeper into
incorporating more ITIL best practices.
Smith knows he can continue to rely on the strong
relationship SCI has had with Ivanti for 16 years and the“outstanding service” the company has provided in order
to see success with the next steps the company may take.
“Every day I come into work there’s a success in Ivanti,”
he says. “Why should tomorrow be any different?”

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What’s Up Next
Ivanti Service Manager has served the SCI environment
well in many ways, including enabling IT’s internal businessclients to better service their own customers – the families
planning their loved ones’ funeral services and memorials.
For instance, if a family member wants to change somethingin an obituary, the funeral director can simply create an
Ivanti ticket on a customer-facing web portal.

www.ivanti.com